I am Jack's sofa, stereo and wardrobe... I make Jack's life complete. I reside in a ActiveRecord table called "things" and Jack is the only one that has the key. This is Jack's life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

As rails developers, we have done this simple relationship over and over again. I'm sure the has_many association is by far the most common in app/db design. It gives a single resource quick and easy access to others, but as your application grows, and depression sets in...

I love autotest. I have event posted before how to extend the idea of autotest sounds to a red/green playlist but now that I am taking more time to extract some of my work to plugins, I really wanted autotest to come with me. The problem is that the default autotest mappings do not play with rails conventions, the biggest being that test files for a lib match the name of the lib with _test.rb at the END of the...

A few months ago I "invested" in a upright Galaga multicade. This is no costly refurb/restoration unit, but rather a customized new build from a great company called Arcadeshop Amusement. This place does two great things. First they will manufacturer/build you a new cabinet of your liking with all the parts professionally installed. This includes the display, JAMMA harness, coin door assembly, control panel, and all artwork. I chose a classic Galaga/Ms.Pacman/Midway cabinet with a 19" CRT display. My only deviation from the Galaga theme was a multicade control panel that had a 4-way joystick and two buttons for the left or right handed.

The second thing about this great company is that sell one of the coolest Multicade JAMMA PCBs I have seen. This board is programmable with a standard serial cable to run game ROM's in their approved list and that included such greats that I wanted like Galaga, Donkey Kong, Ms.Pacman, and Phoenix. For the record... I am not going after Billy Mitchell's record. I just wanted a nice...

Well HomeMarks v2.0 is done and ready for the public. You can download it from my Github project page. It has a real simple rake app:bootstrap task that I came up with over the weekend will have you running a local copy in only a few seconds, give it a try. Sometime over the next few days, I'll move over the live site to this code base too. If you have not yet kept up on the implementation mantra I set down for the HomeMarks v2 project, you might want to read an older post as well as this excerpt from the project README.

I am all about knowing how to survive a zombie invasion – as much as I am a firm believer of using the right tool for the a given job. It can not be argued that killing zombies with a shotgun to the head is as natural a fit as peanut butter to chocolate. They simply just go together.

Writing the new HomeMarks has been a great exercise. I've learned that the AJAX Head Design Pattern Implementation is more akin to developing a service-oriented application (SOA) since I have moved all client-side coupling from the controllers, like RJS, and only respond with HEAD or JSON data. Today I learned...

It has been about 6 months now since I started using the Shoulda testing plugin as my BDD/TDD tool of choice. Unlike a lot of other people, I did not flock to the RSpec bandwaggon. Personally I think RSpec is horribly bloated a sledgehammer for a simple issue, the need to have test code organized with nested setups and context blocks.